Al Qaida’s chemical weapons

Somewhere in or near Afghanistan

A gruesome video found among a library of al Qaida tapes and broadcast on CNN this week shows what appears to be a test of chemical weapons on three dogs, which writhe and yelp in agony before dying. U.S. officials have long suspected that al Qaida was seeking to acquire chemical weapons, and the tape provides evidence that it succeeded. The video was among a collection of about 250 al Qaida tapes shown to CNN reporter Nic Robertson, who declined to say who assembled the archive or where exactly it was located. Other tapes are terror instruction manuals. “These tapes can be replicated,” terror expert Magnus Ranstorp told The New York Times, “which means you don’t need Afghanistan anymore to teach people how to make bombs.”

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